


force of impact

by momentofmemory



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Coping Mechanisms, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Spider-Man: Far From Home, Pre-Spider-Man: Far From Home Mid-Credits Scene, Trains, rip to all pigeons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 07:40:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20738642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/momentofmemory/pseuds/momentofmemory
Summary: Peter jolts awake when the plane taking his class home flies just close enough to a flock of birds to suck two of them into the engines. He’s barely registered their startled squawks—possibly pigeons? do they even fly this high?—before a sickening thunk reverberates through his chest, metaphorically, and through the birds’ chests, very literally. The plane is fine, barely even registering the impact.Peter is not.





	force of impact

**Author's Note:**

> trigger warning: panic attacks, descriptions of violence.
> 
> special thanks to my beta readers [LuthienKenobi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuthienKenobi) & [experimentaldata](https://experimentaldata.tumblr.com/)

Peter jolts awake when the plane taking his class home flies just close enough to a flock of birds to suck two of them into the engines. He’s barely registered their startled squawks—_possibly pigeons? do they even fly this high?_—before a sickening _thunk_ reverberates through his chest, metaphorically, and through the birds’ chests, very literally. The plane is fine, barely even registering the impact.

Peter is not.

He’s been asleep for the better part of three hours, but his lungs are seizing like he’s just finished back-to-back marathons and the hair that’s not plastered to his head is standing up straight along his arms. MJ shifts beside him and the plane rumbles, and Peter bites his lip and reminds himself that he’s _on _a plane, not under one.

He’s fine. He’s fine he’s fine he’s fine. Mysterio is gone and EDITH is tucked safely away in his backpack and he’s _fine_.

His hands spasm in his lap, anxious to do something, but there’s nothing _to _do. The fate of a couple of birds isn’t exactly part of the superhero job description, and anyway nothing—nothing that small can survive being hit by something that big.

_To solve for force of impact, multiply mass times velocity and then divide the product by either distance or time, depending on which variables are known._

He blinks up at the cabin lights, dimmed now to allow the passengers their sleep. He wonders if that’s why the birds didn’t see them coming. 

_The lights in the train were dimmed, too_.

He shuts the thought down as quickly as it comes, but it’s too late to quell his rising anxiety. He can’t afford this; can’t wake his classmates (_MJ shouldn’t see this_), can’t risk someone asking why he looks like death warmed over. Not after Washington, not after Berlin, not after Austria and the Alps and that stupid, stupid photo of Brad’s. So he wraps his hands around the armrests and tries very, very hard to not compare them to the feel of a train’s undercarriage. 

_While in principle a cubic inch of bone can handle up to nineteen thousand pounds of force, in practice, the human femur can withstand only nine hundred before breaking._

He has no idea how that axiom applies to birds, but. Well. He hasn’t figured out how that applies when radioactive spiders are thrown into the mix, either.

_Mass, velocity, time_.

The plane weighs—actually that’s another thing he doesn’t really know; he can google it in a minute. But he does know that their flight is a nonstop from Heathrow, London to Newark Liberty, New Jersey, which he _thinks _is about thirty-five hundred miles. Divide that by seven hours and he’ll have velocity. 

The great thing about numbers is that they aren’t emotional: they’re cold, dispassionate, unfeeling. The problem with Peter is that he _is_ emotional, and thinking about how long this flight is manages to remind him of a nine hour flight with dual adapter headphones and Brad and MJ, and how pleased she’d looked in Venice with the pigeons all over her arms.

It could’ve been the same birds that were now floating around in the engines.

His throat constricts and he’s back to trying to remember what it feels like to breathe, because his ‘Peter Tingle’ has gone from not registering that the man in front of him is a homicidal maniac to freaking out over _birds_, and how they weren’t bothering anyone and were probably just trying to have a good time with their friends and they wouldn’t have even noticed the plane was coming until it was too late and it was so much bigger and _faster_ than they were and _he’s still not sure if this is even real but the pain from the impact definitely is and the pressure doesn’t stop because now it’s gone from pushing him to _crushing_ him and_—

Peter lurches out of his seat and his side catches on the metal armrest, toppling him to the floor. The carpet scrapes his already bruised knees, but he’s too preoccupied by the vice around his chest to care.

_He’s going to die_. 

He knows his chest is healed, or at least enough that it shouldn’t be hurting this much to expand it (_just like the concussion and the cuts and the bruises and whatever the _hell_ happened to his leg_), but taking in any more than the panicked gasps he’s been managing seems impossible.

_One should note that the femur is one of the strongest candidates for surviving an impact: if the blow is to the torso instead, for example, there is a twenty-five percent chance of breaking one or more of the ribs once the force reaches a mere seven hundred and eighty pounds._

The hairs on his arms stand up straight again. He swallows and forces himself to remember his surroundings: it’s the far side of four a.m., but the flight they’re on is booked full, and he’s distantly aware that if he doesn’t snap out of it some of the lighter sleepers are going to take issue with him hyperventilating on the floor.

He doesn’t want to move. He doesn’t think he _can_, not now and maybe not ever. He also doesn’t have a choice.

(_When does he ever?_)

Peter sucks his lower lip between his teeth to keep from whimpering, then curls his hands into fists and pushes himself up onto trembling knees. The action seems to appease the piercing stare of the elderly woman two rows ahead of him in 12C, because she makes a satisfied hum before closing her eyes to settle back to sleep.

_God, sleep sounds amazing_.

_Wouldn’t birds need more sleep than spiders?_

Bile rises into his mouth and the aisle elongates ominously in front of him. Somewhere in the logical part of his brain he knows the illusion is just because he’s about thirty seconds from passing out from oxygen deprivation, but the _oh god i’m dying _part can’t help but think of how much it feels like—like—

_I don’t think you know what’s real, Peter_.

Fear forces a lungful of air down his throat.

He immediately regrets it.

Fire explodes in his chest and stars in his eyes, and he swears he can hear the ghosts of the birds wailing from the engines. Then he’s stumbling towards the back of the plane as fast as he can, because illusions be damned, he’s going to throw up in the middle of the aisle if he doesn’t deal with this _right now_. The next few seconds pass in a blur, but his feet never fall through the floor and the door locks solidly behind him when he finally gets to the bathroom, so he slumps against the countertop and counts it as a win.

The automatic lights turn on with a hum that sets his teeth on edge. He’s barely caught a glimpse of his reflection—gaunt; broken—before he strikes out blindly and the lights immediately wink out. He has no idea if it’s because he hit the off switch or if it’s because he just destroyed that entire section of wiring.

_He just can’t stop thinking about the damn birds._

Peter licks his lips and breathes into the sink, trying to keep from breaking the metal basin under his fingers. His stomach is still rolling.

_Come_ _on, Spider-man._

He’s fought aliens from outer space and _Captain America, _he should be able to handle a chance encounter with a few random pigeons.

_Mass times velocity, divided by time._

This is how he handles things, because his greatest fears can’t hurt him when they’re distilled and compartmentalized down to basic physics. Physics is just math. Numbers and equations and no real world, bone-shattering consequences whatsoever.

_Yeah._

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and winces at the screen’s brightness. He starts to type in his first question (_how heavy is a __boeing__ 747_),but stops. Backspaces. Closes his eyes and swallows, then starts over.

_How fast does the average bullet train travel?_

He forces his nerves to hold steady as the painfully slow wifi thinks about his question, which is immediately followed up by several more (_what does an intercity express train weigh _and _how far is it from berlin to the __netherlands_and _do avengers ever go to counseling?_).

He closes the tab on that last one before it can finish loading.

The answers to his first two questions, however, are _one hundred and fifty miles an hour_ and_ seven hundred fifteen tons_, respectively. He tilts his head back and breathes through his nose while he converts the numbers into the correct units.

He’s barely made it halfway through the equation (_twenty-one _million pounds_ oh my god oh my god oh my god_) before all hopes of long division vanish from his mind and the sink is filled with half-digested remnants of chicken alfredo instead.

He trips backwards, slamming into the wall. The world expands so far he can hear the copilot whispering to one of the flight attendants, and then collapses to where all he can hear is the sound of his own heart beating irregularly in his ears. His cellphone clatters uselessly to the ground beside him, and when his knees buckle shortly after, he falls, too.

_Twenty-one million pounds how is he even alive—_

His hands clutch the sides of his head. His throat is raw and his senses are shot and the pain from every cut and break he’s ignored over the past few days comes roaring to the forefront. He has no idea how much his body compressed at impact; no idea how long or how far it pushed him before he went under. At max it might have been _maybe _three seconds but that’s still _seven million pounds of force holy _shit—

The math won’t work. He _can’t _calculate for the work because—because—

(_because the work is breaking his ribs through his lungs and bruising every cell in his body and he thinks the pain from the impact is unbearable until the wheels wrap around his leg and suck him under, and then it’s an entirely new level of hell as he’s dragged across the tracks and under the cars because it’s on _top_ of him and his leg feels like it’s being ripped from his body and he has to get out but he can’t breathe and the tunnel is too dark and his hands nearly slip off the metal pipes because they’re covered in blood, _his_ blood but he has to get back before Beck kills Ned and MJ and Betty and why did Tony trust him with this and he doesn’t want to die please please please he can’t do this, not again oh god—_)

There’s a quiet knock on the door.

He’s gasping for air, chest stuttering just like it did when he finally pulled himself into the train car, and he can’t handle this, can’t handle trying to _be okay _right now. At least when he collapsed on the train, no one had been around to see him fail.

He knows he should answer before they get too suspicious, but the war between _please go away _and _please help me _is so strong that he winds up saying neither. 

A second knock.

He can hear them breathing outside. It’s a gentle in and out, measured and soft; and if he can hear that over his own uneven gasps they can definitely hear him in return. 

Third knock.

There’s no reason for him not to respond. There’s no one trying to kill him. There’s no vehicle or building on top of him; there’s no twenty ton cement wall he has to move. There’s absolutely no reason to believe anything around him is anything but real.

He opens his eyes and stares at the light peeking out from under the door.

He doesn’t get up.

There’s a long bout of silence, and then footsteps as whoever it is walks away. Tears prick the corner of Peter’s eyes, but he can’t let go, can’t let his guard down. He curls his arms tighter around his knees and tries not to think about how pathetic Tony would think he is now.

_If you were better, maybe he’d still be alive_.

His arms itch underneath his sweatshirt. He knows he sliced them to hell and back trying to get out from under the train, and while they’re healed on the outside he suddenly wonders if there’s still bone fragments floating around between the muscle fibers and nerves. Nausea rears its head once again, and Peter’s seconds away from spiraling headfirst into another breakdown.

The footsteps return.

He hears the sound of a metal hinge being lifted, then with a _schink_the lock flips from announcing _occupied _to _vacant._

Peter’s brain kicks into overdrive and he rockets to his feet, which means he’s standing when the door opens.

“…MJ?”

It’s four in the morning, he’s in the middle of a breakdown, and his crush (_girlfriend_?) is staring at him like hiding in pitch black bathrooms and breaking _into_ pitch black bathrooms is an everyday occurrence.

His first instinct is to slam the door shut and pretend this never happened. But the last time he did that Brad appeared, and as much as he doesn’t want MJ to see how very, _very _broken he is, facing Brad’s derision seems infinitely worse. So instead he drags his sleeve roughly across his eyes and prays the lack of lighting will hide how raw and puffy they are.

It definitely doesn’t, but all she says is, “Hey.”

She’s rubbing her thumbs across her hands like she always does when she’s not sure about something.

“I was just—I was—um—” Peter flounders, gesturing vaguely behind him. MJ’s stare remains impassive, however, so he gives up on the lie before it forms. He swallows and focuses instead on forcing literally anything coherent past his strained vocal chords. “I didn’t know you picked locks.”

“Breaking and entering is a skill every activist should have at her disposal,” MJ says, then looks down at her shoes and shrugs. “But, you know. Airplanes. You lift the metal sign on the outside and the locking mechanism’s right there. I think it’s a safety feature.”

“Oh.” Peter hides his hands inside his worn out sleeves and slides his nails across his palms. “Yeah, that—that make sense.”

“I figure at least one person in this relationship should.”

Peter’s breathing hitches and MJ immediately backtracks. “I mean, I—so are you gonna invite me in or what, Parker?”

Confusion replaces panic as his primary emotion.

MJ nudges the door open a little further and tilts her head towards the front of the plane. “It’s just that we’re kinda obvious here and I’m pretty sure the lady in 12C’s going to kill me if I wake her up again. So.”

Peter doesn’t really respond, but he can’t find it in himself to object, either. MJ steps into the cramped space and closes the door behind them. He hears the lock click back into place, and then the sound of MJ fiddling with the light switch. It suddenly hits him that he’s alone in a cramped, dark room _with MJ _and his heart attempts to leap out of his mouth_._

“I was actually thinking of going back to my seat now, so—”

“Did OSHA forget to give the lights in here a backup or something?”

In that moment, two separate but related things occur. First, MJ flicks on her phone’s flashlight, illuminating the definitely dented panel. Second, Peter sees his reflection in the mirror and it’s so similar to Mysterio’s illusions he immediately loses whatever colour he’d regained in the past couple minutes.

_You’re just a scared little kid in a sweatsuit._

“Whoa, hey, are you—”

He’s back on the floor with his head planted firmly between his knees, not entirely sure how or when that happened. MJ clicks off the light as fast as it came on and curses under her breath.

“Sorry! Sorry; is this like a sensory thing or—”

“S’okay,” Peter chokes out. “Just—I can’t—”

“Okay.”

The light stays off, and MJ hesitates for a few seconds before gingerly sitting down beside him. He ignores the way his heart pounds in his ears and regrets leaving EDITH in his bag.

_This is real. This is real, this is real, this is real._

His breathing is still behaving, a fact for which he’s eternally grateful, but the ever-present sense of doom is just as strong. He’s pretty sure he should be mortified at her seeing him like this, though she doesn’t seem bothered. He’s too stressed to really care either way.

He swallows. “Sorry.”

Peter feels the wall vibrate slightly when she drops her head to rest against it. “For?”

So, so many things. For being gullible, for endangering them all, for hiding in a bathroom. For not being _better. _

He decides to go with the most concrete option. “I almost got you killed with the drones.”

“Nope.” MJ doesn’t hesitate. “_Mysterio_ tried to kill me with drones, irrespective of you. Fortunately for all of us he underestimated my mace skills.”

Peter manages a small smile. “Who could account for Michelle Jones?”

“Damn straight.”

He hears MJ shuffle her feet in front of her to get more comfortable. She doesn’t leave, but she doesn’t move closer, either—a fact he’s infinitely grateful for as he doesn’t think he can handle any kind of crowding. An uncomfortable silence falls, neither quite sure of where to go from here. Peter closes his eyes and tries not to think about how very, very tired and very, very awake he is.

“Sorry,” he says again.

He feels her eyes sliding over him and steels himself for the inevitable line of questioning.

She surprises him again when she licks her lips and says, “The plane we’re on is an Airbus A330.”

Peter lifts his head out from between his arms and stares at her.

“It’s one of the safer planes in the air, so the odds of it crashing are like, five million to one.” She pauses, gauging his reaction. “Google says you’d have to fly every day for fifteen thousand years before you could reasonably expect it to go down.”

Peter doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with that, but the randomness of it all is strangely comforting. “You just… know that off the top of your head?”

“Zoha’s scared of flying. Statistics make for a decent coping mechanism.”

“Oh.” 

MJ hums in agreement, then scoots closer, pausing every so often to give him time to reject her. He doesn’t, so she leans in and settles where their shoulders just barely touch. “So what’s yours.”

Peter threads his fingers through his hair and breathes out, long and slow. “Do you remember when we took Intro to Physics freshman year?”

She tilts her head. “The one where you spent most of the time either sleeping or watching yourself on YouTube?”

Peter flushes. “I paid attention to some things! I just… you know. Knew most of it already.”

“So humble.”

“_Anyway_,” Peter gestures vaguely, “we learned about like, how to calculate the force of falling objects and car crashes and stuff, right? Mass and velocity and whatever?”

MJ looks doubtful, but waits for him to continue.

“At first it was just a game. I knew I was—different,” he stumbles slightly over the word, playing with the hem of his sleeve— “but I wanted to know _how _different. ’Cause I caught a car that was going forty miles an hour and that’s like, that means the force was like _twenty thousand pounds_. That’s…That’s awesome.”

He falls silent and rubs at his wrists where his web-shooters would normally be.

Falling from the sky into a freezing lake, the decathlon team nearly dying, a halved ferry with screaming passengers, crumbling cement buildings, moons shattering around him, aliens, monsters, trains, thousands and thousands of killer drones. A .22 meant for his brain.

He shrugs. His hands go back inside their sleeves. “And then it… wasn’t. Awesome. Anymore.”

Michelle pulls her knees up to her chest. “All fun and games until Nick Fury loses an eye.”

Peter laughs: a bitter, strangled noise that barely qualifies. “Yeah. Yeah, something like that.”

He stares blankly at the sink. If he listens closely, he feels like he can still hear bits of fettuccine making their way down the drain pipes. MJ starts rubbing her thumb again.

“So, uh.” She’s more hesitant than he’s heard her all night. “What kind of forces can one experience in the middle of the night on a passenger airplane?”

Heat floods Peter’s face and he’s immensely grateful she can’t really see his face. “It, uh. It wasn’t exactly me doing the experiencing.”

“If you’re aiming for vague and mysterious it’s working.”

“No, I mean,” Peter pauses. “I just heard some stupid birds and it. I don’t know, brought back some stuff.”

“What, like Venice?”

He glares at her, like his panic-driven brain hadn’t tried to make the same connection not five minutes ago. “Depends; what’re the odds of a Venetian pigeon getting rotisseried by an A330 engine?”

“There’s over four hundred million pigeons in the world and we’re like, two thousand miles from Venice, so. Not great.”

Peter blinks. “How do you _know_—”

“Coping mechanism.”

His head drops back against the wall with a thud_. _“Right.”

A shudder runs through his body; the persistent hum of the plane’s engine feels too much like the rattle of a train car, and there’s still blood and grease under his fingernails, the taste of oil in his mouth. MJ’s breathing changes like she’s about to say something just as Peter decides he can’t hold it in any more.

“Look, I know I’m not the most comforting person ever but I—”

“D’you know the odds of getting hit by a train off the top of your head?”

They both freeze. MJ’s fingers go very, _very_ still, and Peter curses himself for not keeping his stupid mouth shut. 

MJ swallows audibly. “When you say hit, you mean like—like a glancing blow, or—”

Too late to walk it back now.

“Definitely or. And then, uh. Under.”

“Okay. I don’t—yeah, okay.” This time it’s MJ’s breathing that hitches. “I can see why the equation thing didn’t help.”

It’s not much, barely an acknowledgement. But Peter’s been moving so quickly over the last forty-eight hours that he’s barely had a chance to process what happened to him, and hearing it said out loud makes everything feel _real_. Peter didn’t just get hit by a train. Peter got _run over _by a train, and having someone share in the horror of that is finally enough to break through his hastily constructed walls.

It starts out silently, with hot tears rolling down his face to soak into his sweater. He buries his head in his arms in an attempt to hide them from MJ, but the tears are quickly followed by a wet, miserable sniffle. It’s still quiet, but loud enough to eliminate any chance he had at denying it. 

MJ shifts beside him. “…Peter?”

He hugs his knees to his chest and tries not to think about every mean thing Flash has ever said to him about being too _soft_.

“Can I—” she hesitates, and he’s pretty sure he’s about to set the Guinness World Record for fastest time it took for a superhero to make their girlfriend want to break up with them.

But MJ surprises him for the third time. “Are you okay with touch?”

Peter’s brain skips a few seconds; his tears do not. His throat is tight and his nose is running, and it feels like hearing the knock on the door and being wholly incapable of responding all over again.

“It’s totally fine if you’re not, I mean, I’m not usually either, I just thought—if you wanted—”

“_MJ_.”

He manages to get her name out before his throat closes up again, and he hears her teeth slam together. He’s losing track of his breathing again; lungs drowning in imagined fluid. But it’s not like before: he doesn’t have to get up, he doesn’t have to speak. All he has to do is nod.

And this time, he does.

The movement is miniscule at best, and Peter doesn’t know how MJ manages to see it in the dark. But she scoots even closer, their sides smashed up against each other, and rests her head on his shoulder. Her hair tickles his nose and mingles with his tears. Then carefully, hesitantly, MJ drapes an arm around Peter.

It’s not the kind of hug he’s used to. It’s not like Happy’s, which are initiated by Peter and bewilderingly returned, or the enveloping and innocent hugs Ned gives without restraint, or even the stressed but always stable hugs from May. Instead, MJ’s hug is stiff, like she’s never quite done this before, but it’s _there_ and it’s _real_ and it’s enough to let him know that she’s not going anywhere. 

He doesn’t stop crying all at once, because he’s not okay. But more importantly MJ doesn’t ask him to be, and doesn’t seem to need him to be, either. For the first time since Berlin Peter truly feels like he isn't alone.

They sit like that for awhile—Peter’s arms wrapped around his legs, MJ’s arms wrapped around Peter. Slowly, his tears morph into hiccups, and then the hiccups into slow, even breaths. He relaxes deeper into the embrace. She does, too.

At some point, MJ takes out her phone with her free hand (brightness dimmed all the way), and Peter lifts his head out of his arms to watch her. He can’t see the screen, but he can see her face, and the way her brow is scrunched up in the middle. He reaches over to the toilet paper dispenser, careful not to disturb her grip on him, and wipes his nose.

“Thanks.” His voice is quiet, worn out from crying. It’s enough for her to hear it for what it is.

Her eyes glance over at him briefly before returning to her phone.

“So if I’m doing the math right,” she offers, thumb still scrolling, “less than a tenth of a percent of a percent of Americans get hit by a train every year, so assuming the census bureau got their numbers right, the odds of it happening to you again are around two million to one.”

“…Huh,” Peter says, blinking owlishly over her shoulder. He thinks he’s starting to get the hang of this. “Coping mechanism.”

“Yep,” MJ says, popping the ‘p’ at the end. Her thumb stops fidgeting and she clears her throat. “But not yours, so uh. I’m a hundred and thirty pounds. Or like, sixty kilograms, I guess.”

“…What?”

Before MJ has a chance to clarify her statement, someone pounds on the door. Peter flinches instinctively and MJ responds by tightening her fingers around his shoulder. He waits for the inevitable rush of panic.

It doesn’t come.

He flexes his fingers, counts to ten, and releases a long, slow breath. He’s on edge, yes, but his ‘Peter Tingle’ is silent. The nerves he’s experiencing are no more than anyone might expect from a sudden interruption.

Peter disentangles himself from MJ’s grasp and she follows his lead, stretching her arms and rising to her feet. She clicks her phone screen off and Peter straightens his sweater as he stands, aiming to make himself at least somewhat presentable.

MJ finds his hand in the dark. “You okay?”

There’s an insistent pounding on the door, _one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three one._

Peter squares his shoulders and traces his thumb over hers. He nods.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.”

“_I know you’re in there—!_” The stage whisper is cut off as MJ unlocks the door and swings it open, revealing the woman from 12C.

“Gracious!”

Peter feels his ears turn red at the older woman’s scandalized stare, but MJ is the definition of unflappable.

“Hope those glasses of yours include night vision,” she says, pulling Peter into the hallway. “Lights are broken.”

The woman sputters, but MJ’s ushered her into the bathroom and closed the door before anyone has a chance to comment further. Peter winces at the sound of muted cursing coming from inside, unsure if he should offer assistance. MJ just smirks and starts tugging him down the aisle.

The lights are still dimmed and everyone else is still asleep, so they manage to make it back to their seats with no further altercations. They slide in carefully, MJ first and Peter right after. She shifts beside him, trying to get comfortable in the upright seats, before forcing the seat divider out of the way so he can scoot closer.

She doesn’t let go of his hand.

Peter leans down and opens his backpack, rummaging around until he finds EDITH. He pulls the glasses out and considers them while MJ watches him with a curious glint in her eye. There’s not the slightest tingle from his extra sense.

Peter leans into MJ’s shoulder, curling his legs under him, and hangs EDITH on his shirt collar. MJ’s hand in his own is solid and warm: he doesn’t need a surveillance network to let him know this is real.

But he does want to know one more thing, so he whispers: “Fifty kilograms?”

“Sixty, you dork. Fifty would be horrifying.” He can tell she’s rolling her eyes even if he can’t see them. “But, uh. It’s how much I weigh. And I’m pretty sure I tap out at like, nine miles an hour.”

Peter frowns and MJ heaves a sigh that blows a lock of hair away from her face. “In case, you know. Your calculations.”

It takes Peter a minute to follow her line of thinking, but when he does his face splits into a smile and his hand tightens around hers.

_Mass and velocity_.

He thinks of how exhausted he was after the final fight with Mysterio, limping across the bridge on his still-broken leg, wanting to rest but _needing _to know she was okay. Seeing her alive and whole and badass as ever with her mace and broken necklace. The way she crashed into him and the way they lingered, arms wrapped around each other like the whole world would collapse if they let go.

_Time._

MJ untangles her fingers from his and loops her arm around his shoulders, and he burrows into her grasp and breathes deeply.

Peter doesn’t need physics to know MJ’s force of impact is something he can handle.

**Author's Note:**

> ...and then they fall asleep à la the incredibly adorable [deleted scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77OjEqP9UFQ) and (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
> 
> this was researched fairly extensively so pretty much all of the math/facts should be accurate (yes, including the one about the bathroom locking mechanism), but if you see any issues you can feel free to let me know. i thoroughly enjoyed writing this and hope you enjoyed reading it, and you can come scream at me either in the comments or on [tumblr](https://momentofmemory.tumblr.com/) if you so desire. :)


End file.
